In Montreal! How cool is that? I'll be working for my current employer, also a sponsor, to locate Python talent. I'll have a few copies of my books that I can give away. Most importantly, the promotional code PYCON_LOTT gives 50% off my Packt titles and runs from April 7th …

Years ago -- many years ago -- I self-published three books on Python. I also set up a Google Group, Building Skills Books, for a discussion area. For a while, I check my download logs carefully to see how the book was being received. Then I became a tech nomad, and commenced …

We have three major tiers of configuration for applications. Within each tier, we have sub-tiers, larding on yet more complexity. The organization of the layers is a bit fungible, too. Making good choices can be rather complex because there are so many variations on the theme of "configuration". The desktop …

New Kindle Edition of Building Skills in Object-Oriented Design.

It seems to work okay in my Kindle Readers.

I'm not sure it's really formatted completely appropriately. I'm not a book designer. But before I fuss around with font sizes, I think I need to spend some time on several more …

Wound up here: "A Place to Hang Your Hat" and the #LABHR hash tag.

H/T to this post: "Building a Hat Rack."

This is a huge idea. I follow some folks from the Code For America group. The +Mark Headd Twitter feed (@mheadd) is particularly helpful for understanding this …

New from Packt Publishing: Functional Python Programming. Also here on Amazon. The fun part is covering generator functions, iterators, and higher-order functions in some real depth. There's a lot of powerful programming techniques available. What's challenging is reconciling Python's approach to FP with languages that are purely functional like Haskell …

The context is an ongoing question about optimization -- not my strong suit -- and the SciPy algorithms for this. See Scipy.optimization.anneal Problems for some additional confusion over simple things.

The new quote is this:

However, firing up Python, NumPy, SciPy and figuring out which solver to use is not …

Read this: The Most Diabolical Python Antipattern. Now you've been told. You no longer have any excuses. [Link fixed.]

Three terms that seem to cause confusion: Idempotence, Hysteresis and Deterministic. The subject came up during my webcast on the Five Kinds of Python Functions. We can use all three terms to describe a function. Two of them are relevant to common design questions in software. The third is a …